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Making Europe
The Extra-European Origins of the Old World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2022
Abstract
This article reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century, and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the article explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: the question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in the relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.
Résumé
Cet article s’intéresse à la manière dont les historiens et les économistes ont pensé l’histoire économique de l’Europe. Il remarque que les explications internes qui accordent peu d’attention au monde non européen ont dominé pendant plus d’un siècle, et passe en revue certaines des raisons de cet eurocentrisme. Cependant, un tel nombrilisme a également été de plus en plus contesté depuis un certain temps, d’abord principalement par des universitaires et des militants non européens. L’article explore enfin les débats actuels au sein de la discipline et sa reconnaissance croissante des interactions entre les économies européennes et non européennes. Deux sujets de discussion ayant joué un rôle crucial dans cette évolution sont particulièrement détaillés : la question du rôle de l’esclavage dans le développement économique européen et les riches débats qui ont lieu dans le domaine relativement nouveau de l’histoire globale du travail. Finalement, si les efforts visant à écrire l’histoire économique de l’Europe en la confinant à ses propres frontières mal définies peuvent répondre à des besoins politiques particuliers, ils sont, dans les faits, historiquement trompeurs.
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References
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31 See, for example, Barbara L. Solow, The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Lanham: Rowman, 2014).
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38 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
39 See, for example, Jack A. Goldstone, Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850 (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2008), as well as the references in the following note.
40 A small sampling of these works needs to include Peer Vries, “Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,” Journal of World History 12 (2001): 407–46; Philip C. C. Huang, “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China,” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002): 501–38, which sharply critiques Pomeranz’s views on British and Chinese agriculture in the eighteenth century; Robert C. Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c. 1620–c. 1820,” Economic History Review 62 (2009): 525–50, which offers a more nuanced assessment of Pomeranz’s contentions regarding comparative agricultural productivity; Jan Luiten van Zanden and Eltjo Buringh, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through the Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 409–45; Peer Vries, “The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence,” History Compass 8 (2010): 730–51, appearing first in the Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 24, no. 4 (2008): 6–49, which argues that the Californians often exaggerate the resemblances between western Europe and East Asia and should be more specific when it comes to time, place, and the differing historical trajectories of various regions; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Williamson, Trade and Poverty; Bozhong Li and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (2012): 956–89; Peer Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, Great Divergence and Great Convergence: A Global Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2015); Peer Vries, “What We Do and Do Not Know about the Great Divergence at the Beginning of 2016,” Historische Mitteilungen der Ranke-Gesellschaft 28 (2016): 249–97; Paul Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales, 1560–2000 (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2007); E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Kaoru Sugihara and Gareth M. Austin, eds., Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013).
41 Samir Amin, L’eurocentrisme. Critique d’une idéologie (Paris: Anthropos, 1988), 119–22; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890 to 1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 222–23.
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44 Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (2017): 1431–58.
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48 See for example: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985); Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (New York: Grove Press, 2001); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2014).
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50 Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England; Mauricio Drelichman, “The Curse of Moctezuma: American Silver and the Dutch Disease,” Explorations in Economic History 42 (2005): 349–80; Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen Broadberry and Kevin H. O’Rourke, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 1, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten R. Prak, “Demographic Change and Migration Flows in Holland between 1500 and 1800,” in Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 237–45; Peter Foldvari, Bas van Leeuwen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “The Contribution of Migration to Economic Development in Holland 1570–1800,” De Economist 161, no. 1 (2013): 1–18; Beckert, Empire of Cotton.
51 Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.
52 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990); Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence; William J. Ashworth, The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
53 Pomeranz, “Scale, Scope and Scholarship.”